The bike commute [bicycling]

[rebeccmeister]

On Monday morning our mayor declared a Snow Emergency, which means that anyone whose car is parked on the street must move their car to the even side of the street for one 24-hour period, then the odd side of the street for the next 24-hour period, so the city can send through its massive snow blower to gather up and haul all of the snow offsite. To facilitate this, the city opened up additional parking in some strategic locations throughout the city. Surely not as convenient as that one spot close to a person's house, but still. I watched a short TV news clip about all this, and all I can think to myself is, so this means that every street parked vehicle in this city requires a minimum of TWO parking spaces for home parking, instead of just one. If I understand correctly, that means that there must be a bare minimum of FOUR parking spaces per vehicle, provided either for free or at a greatly subsidized rate (home, work, third space like grocery store, library, etc).

Suddenly, having off-street parking seems less like a selfish thing and more like a generous thing for helping to keep streets clear and accessible for everyone. The same goes for riding a bike instead of driving. Many people perceive a person on a bicycle as a major inconvenience while driving, but the major inconveniences I observed this morning involved people having badly parked their cars, or buses or garbage trucks having a hard time on narrowed streets.

I haven't shoveled my car out yet, I certainly don't feel like driving around in this stuff.

The bike commute was great, because all of the major roads along my commute route have been plowed. I do have to share more space with vehicles, because in many places the plowed snow is stored in the bike lane. That's why I'm a bike lane skeptic. But the majority of people driving are pretty patient. As you might also know, if you drive or bike around. It still does only take that one asshole, though. This morning that one asshole tried to squeeze me into a pair of trash cans that were sticking out further into the road because of the snow. Fortunately, I was paying attention so I didn't get hit. I did my best to scream at them and gave them a generous gesture with my hand. Not that I expect they noticed, but it at least made me feel slightly better.

And thus, to work.

Comments

[soemand]

When I lived in an urban core; Ottawa ftw, I did car sharing since it was a thing in that city. Most of the benefits you describe of off street parking; plus more people to keep the car busy and maintained.

My main use of the car was to go skiing in Quebec on weekends 🤣

[rebeccmeister]

Good car share systems are so great! My partner scrottie tried and tried with the car share system set up in Albany, but we've had several sketchy/bad experiences with it all (car not there when we were trying to use it to get my mom to the train station to catch her train, really messed-up steering column on one, etc etc).

I'm more than happy to loan out my existing car to anyone who needs one, but they would need to know how to drive a manual transmission vehicle, and that's a hurdle for a lot of Americans (it was a hurdle for me, too, when I bought the car!). My main reasons for having the car now are to be able to do things like skiing and hiking and long-distance bicycling (when start points are in some random small town). Oh, and driving back and forth across the U.S., mostly for biology field research. I originally bought it to tow the wooden boat I built from Seattle back to New York, and it was useful for that, too.

I will continue to wish that infrastructure in this country was built better to make all these things possible without requiring car ownership or use. But infrastructure is tremendously difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to change. So here we are.

[soemand]

Good car share systems are so great!

They are. Then, I think I was paying around $100 a month, including bus pass discount through the service. Included gas and insurance as part of the pricing. Given parking in dt Ottawa was around 70/month, no opportunity cost was lost. At all.

The Ottawa program was privately, but professionally run; dovetailed with a similar program in Montréal.

they would need to know how to drive a manual transmission vehicle,

My Rio is stick, but the latest car is cvt. The old canard of millenial antitheft device might be appropriate.

[twoeleven]

If I understand correctly, that means that there must be a bare minimum of FOUR parking spaces per vehicle

Let's go back to that first phrase. :) If my car is at home, somebody else can use the spaces at the store, library, etc my car would occupy there. IME, if businesses have on-street parking, there's a lot of contention for those spaces between customers and people nearby.

If I worked a job that hired people for multiple shifts, somebody else's car would be using the one I use during my shift. But multi-shift factories would doubtless have parking lots.


Suddenly, having off-street parking seems less like a selfish thing and more like a generous thing for helping to keep streets clear and accessible for everyone.

Finally, we agree on something about cars! :) For the most part, I think there's a lack of imagination and money dedicated to the urban parking problem. We've lived in apartment buildings with underground parking. It seems that for apartment buildings up to three stories high, there's sufficient room for every apartment to have a space for one car in a basement garage. IME, one car per apartment is fine in urban areas.

In Philly, there is or was¹ an art-house theater under a parking garage. I thought that was particularlly clever: movie theaters need darkness and quiet, and underground is a good place to get both. But they also need places for the audience to park. Once one is going to build a parking garage, making it taller to accommodate other people is easy and profitable.

The price of a movie ticket was applied as a discount to the cost of parking, so cheap parking for the audience, essentially, but everybody else paid through the nose. Or you could view it as parking with a free movie thrown in, which I did a couple of times.

1: The theater went bust during the pandemic, but a non-profit acquired it for a dollar to keep it in business as an art house, with a subsidy from the Philly government. I'm not sure what's happened to it since.

And in some city, we went shopping at a multi-story supermarket attached to a parking garage. That was also a good use of space.


Many people perceive a person on a bicycle as a major inconvenience while driving

When cyclists start obeying traffic laws, and stop treating groups of pedestrians as obstacle courses, I'll stop regarding them as nuisances or hazards to life and limb. I expect the Chicago Cubs to win another World Series first. (The Cubs' original Curse lasted 108 years. ;) )

[rebeccmeister]

A cursory Internet search suggests that the current national average is more like 7 spaces per vehicle!

[twoeleven]

Huh!

I'm surprised it's that high, but not surprised that it's high, period.

A year or so ago, the county planning board went on a "listening tour". I'm not sure that they actually heard what we said, but somebody mentioned that parking lots are completely overbuilt: there are far more parking spaces available than anybody ever needs.

Which encouraged me to see about gathering a little data. The claim is generally, and starlingly true: parking lots around here are nearly empty nearly all the time. The exceptions seem to be around restaurants, supermarkets, and doctors' offices -- places people often spend a lot of time -- and the local megamall during the $mas rush.

But that's all suburban, where land is cheap, and planning agencies rarely work properly. I remain impressed by the Paris regional planning agency. They know how to plan!

[rebeccmeister]

Tell me more about Paris! I've experienced it on foot, transit, and by bicycle (including changes from 2011-2023), but don't know how their planning agency is doing it all...

[twoeleven]

Wellll, other than my posts about the city, I'm not sure what you want me to say. :)

I mentioned the Paris Regional Institute while babbling about transportation:

two things impressed me about paris and its regional planning institute:

• the parisian mass transit system is incredible. it's dense and extensive, and both layout and results indicate it's solving the area's problems. and the parisians are still expanding it.

• the regional planning institute is the most sophisticated and comprehensive i've ever seen. it's not just transit planning, but all aspects of urban planning. and they even study what other areas are doing, both as models to copy and object lessons to avoid.

US cities, US regional transit planning organizations, and US universities do good work in urban planning/transit planning, but nothing like the parisians do. they're in distant second place. nobody else even seems to try.

Reasonably enough, most of what they write is in French, but the abstracts/summaries usually have an English translation. Since English is half French, half German, and half stuff from other languages, ;) I can generally tease out the overall meaning of paragraphs, especially when they refer to figures.